


Give me a Hand

by capncrystal



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: Gen, Loss of Limbs, Non-Graphic Violence, angst? what angst?, dragons headcanons, non-canon backstory, one-handed mags headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 08:54:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7611640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capncrystal/pseuds/capncrystal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Magoughin joined the Royal Dragon Corps and the price he paid in one of the battles. Light on angst, heavy on cheer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give me a Hand

**Author's Note:**

> "Someone laughed, broad-faced and friendly. He waved his one enormous shovel-pan hand in the air like a child at school eager for recognition." -Havemercy, page 54
> 
> Yeah, so, that was probably either a typo or Thom being damn strange in his description, but I ran with it. Forgive this unbeta'd mess of headcanons.

When Magoughin joined His Majesty’s Elite Royal Dragon Corps, there were five other functioning dragons. He’d spent a bit of time as a soldier before that, traipsing over the Cobalts in a long and useless campaign. All he’d really learned from the venture was that fighting on the ground was a good way to get sick, lose a limb or run out of food and starve to death before backup arrived with rations or the Ke-han motherfuckers found them and ended their misery. That was the first and last campaign Magoughin participated in before applying to be shown to one of the flying mechanical beasties. After all, fighting in the air was a hell of a lot more effective, and he could still call himself a soldier with pride.

Honestly, he’d expected more red tape, what with the nature of Volstov’s military being what it was. The first round of interviews was with a Basquiat head-shrinker and a physician, assessing his physical capabilities and checking for any diseases and impurities. He knew he was in fine shape, but so was everyone else applying for the job, so he flirted with the doctors and went back to his barracks without much hope of being called back.

The following morning, he was proven wrong, summoned to the impersonal grey building for another interview, this time with the commander of the airmen himself. General Walram was an oily fart of a man who didn’t ride a dragon and impressed Magoughin in all the wrong ways. He was short and impressively fat, wearing what had to be a custom fitted dress uniform with a wide red sash that made him look less like a general and more like a fancy cake, edged in fancy gilded epaulettes and topped with an enormous walrus moustache that he didn’t seem to notice had food crumbs in it. It was all Magoughin could do to keep a straight face while the man barked an introduction at him, and he distracted himself by mentally commissioning a cake from his parent’s bakery that was decked out in blue, edged in gold and sashed in red.

Despite the unctuousness and pompousness of the man, Magoughin ended up liking him a great deal. General Walram (who Magoughin had privately renamed to General Walrus) was very similar to the wealthy Charlotte merchants his parents got on with, and he certainly looked like he enjoyed a cake or three at dinner. If he loosened up and had a bit of wine, he might even have some good stories.

Walram led him to the dragon pens, waddling in front of him with pomp and ceremony, and by the time they went underground Magoughin had tears in his eyes from biting back laughter. It died away quickly, though, when a massive mechanical head peeked over a swinging door and looked at him with black eyes as large as his own wide face.

“That’s Proudmouth,” Walram sniffed. “She belongs to Sergeant Adamo. You’ll be meeting Chastity. Come along, let’s get this over with.”

He hadn’t realized, before, what being a dragonrider would be like. Oh, he’d given a lot of thought to its meaning, its dangers and honors, but the actual, immediate reality of riding a dragon had somehow slipped through the cracks. He lingered a moment, awed by the silver and onyx filigree of Proudmouth’s horns and her golden, flared underjaw. She winked at him, releasing him from whatever spell had been laid on his attention and he walked quickly to overcome the slack he’d left between him and the great overdressed walrus ahead of him.

Chastity was wider in the shoulders than he was tall, built like boulders stacked on top of each other. She looked more like a dinosaur than a dragon, with a wicked ball-ended tail and a plate across her forehead that looked like she could send the cobalts themselves crashing down if she got some decent momentum built up for a charge. As it was, she was lolling on her side like a great cat, resting her face on her forelegs and watching him with lazy curiosity. They stared at each other, assessing, for some interminable length of time before moving.

“You smell alright,” she finally said, rolling over onto her belly. Her wings, enormous metal and canvas kites that brushed the ceiling when they stretched, spread out on either side of her, folding in just shy of the equipment that lined the sides of the pens. “Is there a brain in that empty-looking head of yours?”

Ignoring the phlegmy harrumph of disapproval behind him, Magoughin stepped forward with a grin. “I’m sure it’s in there somewhere,” he answered with a bow, “though it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.”

Her head tilted. “That’s alright. I can do the thinking for both of us, as long as you get me out of this box and into the sky.”

Magoughin’s voice went oddly choked, and he closed the distance between them to put a hand on her snout, feeling the warm metal under his hand and the odd vibration of the mechanics within her. “I can’t wait, darlin’. We’re gonna give ‘em hell.”

~

Magoughin was signed up and sworn in that very day, and moved in that week in between lessons in tactics and mechanics. He also got a lesson in history; there were five other dragons, though there once had been more. Three dragons had been scrapped and were in the process of being rebuilt into other girls, their riders fallen off or rehabilitated into soldiers. There had once been eight dragons. Chastity made six. He hoped to hell and back the numbers made a more straightforward progression after that, if for no other reason than they made it easier to keep track.

He met Adamo first, though everyone who knew about the dragonriders knew about Adamo. Chief Master Sergeant Adamo wasn’t the first dragonrider, but he was the oldest now, and his dragon was the only one of that first generation that didn’t stop during the first lull in the fighting. Proudmouth wasn’t the biggest, either, but she could fuck up the Ke-han bastards like none of the others because she was smart as a whip and knew where to strike. He outranked the rest of the airmen, taking orders directly from General Walram himself and doing most of the interacting with the boys on behalf of the crown. The man had a hell of a pair of lungs on him, as well as a vocabulary that could melt steel. Magoughin had to privately file away a few of the choice phrases for later use.

The other airmen were somewhat easier to get along with. Magoughin was big enough that he hadn’t felt dwarfed by anyone since he was too young to grow a beard, but Ghislain put him to shame for sheer size. He was wickedly smart, too, and fast, which was just unfair. Compagnon wasn’t small either- anyone who rode the crusher class of dragons had to be big enough to fit on their backs, after all- but he was still slender, long and lithe and graceful like a fencer. The other established airmen were, if not puny, decidedly more human-sized. Merritt was more freckle than person, and had the attention span of a drunk butterfly; Evariste had his nose in a book the first few times Magoughin saw him, and didn’t bother with the basic formalities of saying hello to his new comrade. It took Magoughin a week to even get his name.

It was not an auspicious start, but it was something he could work with. The other crushers, at least, were something approaching civil. And there was no social tension a bottle of decent brandy and an off-color joke about whores couldn’t ease, especially with soldiers.

~

The first time Magoughin flew, he thought the stars would sing to him. Chastity cheered as loud as he did when her massive, ball-ended tail smashed a watchtower she landed nearby, and when she spat fire at the fleeing soldiers the heat made his skin feel like the crackling finish on a roast pig.

The second time, it was even better, and the experience never did turn sour or get boring. Not the third time, fourth time, or any time thereafter. Magoughin gave up counting around thirty. It was too much fun for labels.

Chastity wasn’t the only dragon who landed to do her dirty work, but she was hell on the ground like nobody’s business. She was all boulders, as impossible to stop as a mountain landslide. Nothing was left behind intact. Oh, Compassus could inspire terror just by flying, the sheer size of her rumbling the sky like distant thunder and her wicked claws tearing grown men from crotch to crown with a single swipe, and Spiridon was almost more firebreather than crusher, landing wreathed in green flame like she’d risen from tartarus itself and wreaking havoc with the massive spikes on her elbows and knees and the enormous, rhinocerous-like horn on her head. Even Proudmouth did her share of damage, flying almost unseen in the dark, landing like a nightmare come to life in exactly the best spot to cause the most damage. The crushers were hell for the Ke-han bastards. They could burn and claw and bite, but nobody smashed like his girl, especially when he knew he had Illarion and Vachir circling back and forth above him to rain fiery hell on either side. And then, with a signal whistle, they would be off, flying away covered in blood and soot and hard-won victory.

Those were the good old days, the days when four or five of them at a time would go out. Not everything was good, of course. They all had to watch out for catapults, which was how one of the three out-of-commission dragons had gone down. Aside from that, there were unholy and unnatural winds that could damn near blow him off course, if he wasn’t careful. Some nights they couldn’t even get close, the moon too bright or the Ke-han fuckers too awake, and they could do no damage at all.

Adamo was hell in the sky with tactics, and he had a way of getting the boys to work with him that had everything to do with respect, even if they did still give him a hard time in the common room. He got promoted after a while, once it became obvious to everyone that his advice was a damn sight better than Walram’s, and that he could put on the dress uniform and address the crown as well as Walram ever could, only without the extra food rations. Magoughin was a little sad to see Walram go, if only for the loss of the easy source of jokes.

New dragons were added as they were completed and found riders. The addition of two new firebreathers and a swift prototype made their job a bit easier, since Evariste was running ragged at the edges after too many sleepless nights led to a near-miss with the catapult that damaged Illarion’s wing. It wasn’t anything that couldn’t be repaired, but Adamo still chewed him out something fierce and took him off the roster for a week.

It always seemed, to Magoughin, that they might have chosen the new riders a bit hastily. Amery, the swift rider, was some moneyed country boy with every sign of classic Volstovic nobility in his features. He had a temper, though, and didn’t take to the usual soldierly hazing very well. Ivory was friendly enough, until he wasn’t; the man could drop to ten degrees below freezing with a good chance of murder quicker than a cat dropped into a bath.  That one made the handler’s lives hell, with his knife and temper out if they handled his girl with even a touch of disrespect. He was the type, Magoughin though, that would see dirt that wasn’t there, and he privately guessed that they would all regret it before the war was won.

The bright spot was Niall, whose older brothers were in the army and probably jealous of him for the first time in their lives. Niall, like Magoughin, could appreciate a good joke and entertained them all with the colorful if somewhat uneducated language he’d grown up with.

The addition of a swift into their ranks improved their battles by a lot. They never went out with more than two crushers anymore, and Anastasia could fly ahead almost unseen and signal the best spots to drop in. There were risky moments with Erdeni’s fireballs falling a little too close to where Magoughin had Chastity, but that was part of battle, wasn’t it?

On his downtime, Magoughin took his cue from the rest and kept his family visits private. His father was a pastry chef in a cute little bakery along the Rue, and his mother ran the books and kept the place in the black. He wasn’t ashamed of them, nor was he ashamed of his new brothers, but there were things that ought to be kept separate in life. Besides, none of the boys were mannered enough for a visit to another Airman’s family, unless they wanted to be, and he didn’t trust a one of them as far as he could throw them.

The raid siren went off a few nights a week for the next few months, and only one dragon was completed before the summer was out and the raids began to taper off. She was an experimental type, made by the same magician who’d made Compassus so they all had a go at teasing Ghislain about finding his new baby brother. In fact, Magoughin and Ghislain were both on the roster one crisp autumn night, drinking cider instead of wine and eating the pumpkin cookies Niall was making raw instead of waiting for them to cook, avoiding his playful warnings about the sicknesses that could come with eating raw eggs and tossing the tiny balls of dough across the room into each other’s mouth. Magoughin narrowly missed getting beaned in the eye when the siren went off, and he couldn’t even chew Ghislain out over it because they were rushing to their rooms to get to their girls, pulling on their goggles and gloves and singing the usual soldier mantras to get their blood up and their excitement spiked.

There wasn’t anything in the air to mark the night as different from any other. The sky was nearly cloudless, not great cover for the dragons but it almost didn’t matter because the moon was at her darkest stage and they were nothing but silhouettes blocking out the stars. Cassiopeia flew point, a slim arrow of bright silver for them to follow. Compassus followed behind, a sound like bricks rubbing together every time her massive wings beat but she was silent compared to the thunder she’d cause when they descended. Under his knees, Chastity hummed softly, a haunting sound that blended in with the night wind roaring past his ears.

Then, they were battling. Cassiopeia dropped like a shot, screaming fire at a lit up camp along the mountainside. Chastity was there before Compassus, smashing the catapults before they could go off, punching through the defensive line as thunder crashed around them to signal Compassus’ landing.

Magoughin didn’t see how it was possible, but somehow one of the Ke-han soldiers managed to climb onto Chastity, avoid her snapping teeth and come at him with a knife. Magoughin, distracted with steering her into as many carefully-built structures as possible, paid the obviously suicidal man little attention until he jammed a knife through his toughened flight glove and between the fine bones within, making it impossible to steer his girl correctly. Screaming defiance like one of the dragons himself, Magoughin kicked the man back to the ground and hollered at Chastity to get back up in the air.

He’d never been leader of a group before, but his retreat seemed to give the signal to the others to retreat as well, ducking the sudden gusts of wind that were so much more dangerous now than they’d ever been. Fortunately for them both, Chastity knew what she was about. She got them over Volstov without him steering, barely able to hold on because he was getting dizzy spells from the pain. Landing was more difficult- not for her, because she’d done it a hundred times by now, if not more. Some spot of him that was cocooned by all the pain wished he hadn’t stopped counting their raids.

Magoughin had never fallen after dismounting, even if he’d had shaky legs and a powerful need to throw up the first few times; he’s never just rolled off her and crashed to the floor, shouting as a new burst of agony radiated from his hand, wrecked and useless. One of her handlers ran in and helped him sit, checking his hand and then running off to find a medic.

Magoughin was carted off before the other airmen could find him and give him hell for going and getting wounded, and he didn’t see them until after the ordeal was over. He threw up a few times, feverish and angry and suddenly worried about the tendrils of black snaking up from the hole in his hand towards the elbow. The bastion doctors were real worried about it, too, and had to call in someone with a Talent to take a look. The last thing he remembered from that night was getting a shot in his arm, and rambling something romantic and probably incoherent at the lady doctor with pretty green eyes as she held the back of his head, waiting for him to go under.

When Magoughin woke up, he was missing his arm from the elbow. He was too stoned off whatever the good doctors had given him to realize the implications; it only seemed strange to him that his arm wasn’t there, and he wondered for a moment where it had run off to until raising his arm became too painful and he laid back down and went back to sleep, uneasy even if he couldn’t say just why.

~

He stayed at the hospital for almost a week, eating painkillers and gruel and not doing much of anything. He had to be near the Airman building, because there were nights when he could hear the raid sirens go off. He stayed up all night, those nights, even though there was no window for him to keep an eye out for returning dragons and the painkillers he was on made it hard to walk around without getting dizzy as hell.

Ghislain came to visit him before anyone else. He was sitting in a chair by the bed when Magoughin woke up, slouched down and flipping through a book. He sat up straight when he noticed Magoughin looking at him, setting the book down and picking something else up from the pocket of his coat.

“Scone?” Ghislain offered, unwrapping the pastry from its waxed paper.

“Oh, holy fuck yes, please,” Magoughin almost begged, suddenly desperate for something that wasn’t soupy hospital food. He sat up, too, holding his brand new stump of an arm close to his side and reaching out with the arm he still had all of to take the pastry.

They sat in silence as he ate, which was unnerving, but the scone had cranberries in it and some kind of sugary glaze and Magoughin decided he wouldn’t stop eating even if the room caught fire. Once he was finished, though, Ghislain finally broke the silence.

“Thoushalt picked her rider yesterday,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs with an ankle resting over the other knee. “You’ll hate him, he’s like Merritt and Ivory had a kid and fed that kid nothing but coffee.”

Magoughin couldn’t help but laugh. “Why would I hate him? He sounds promising.”

“He tried to jump off the roof yesterday,” Ghislain pointed out. “And he’s already signed up for every available raid slot, including two on the same shift. Chief had to explain to him how that was actually physically impossible.” They stared at each other for a moment, a grin tugging at the corners of Magoughin’s mouth.

“I like him already,” he admitted, trying not to laugh. Ghislain just snorted.

“Anyway, nobody’s calling him my baby brother anymore. He’s too weird.” Ghislain shifted again, planting his feet on the ground and resting his arms on his knees. “Chief doesn’t know what to do about your dragon,” he said softly, looking at the distant wall in a manly effort to not display emotion.

Magoughin, despite the pain, raised his stump. “Hey man, let me talk to him. Help me up.” Ghislain stared at him, nonplussed, and Magoughin raised his eyebrows. “C’mon, give me a hand.” The silence spread, and with it, Magoughin’s grin got wider. “Get it? Because I’m missing my hand?”

Ghislain shook his head. “What did they give you? I think I want some.” He slapped Magoughin’s knee, not too hard.

“Painkillers, man. You’d think my hand being gone would make it hurt less.” Magoughin laid back down, knowing full well he wasn’t going anywhere just yet. He let Ghislain leave with a promise to smuggle in more food tomorrow, right under the nose of the disapproving lady doctor who’d put him under. She made him stay for three more days, and made him several appointments for therapy for the weeks after, so even when he left he wasn’t free of the sterile environment.

Before he left, Magoughin gave her a strange, but very serious request. When she heard it, she paled and took a step back.

“Why would you want that?” She asked, alarmed and trying not to show it.

“The way I see it,” he smiled, “It’s a part of me and I want it.” She shook her head, crossed her arms, considered for a moment and then sighed.

“I’ll have to check with the magicians first,” She informed him, and left. The next day, however, it was delivered to his room, wrapped in gauze and desiccated, too small now for him to believe it had ever been a part of him.

~

He had expected a stern dressing down from Adamo, not the restrained formality he got. Adamo was in dress blues for the first time since his promotion, and even though he didn’t pull at the collar Magoughin could tell he wanted to. He’d always been more comfortable in his own clothes, and dressing up didn’t make him do his job any better; it was one of Adamo’s best traits.

They talked about his potential career as a soldier, which meant that Adamo suggested Magoughin retire quietly, and Magoughin disabused Adamo of the notion that there was even a remote possibility of that happening. There were options, Adamo tried to explain, such as helping to train the new recruits or becoming a handler. The issue of his dragon was a pricklier topic; nobody wanted to see her dismantled, but there might not be a choice. By the time they agreed to go down to the corrals and see Chastity, Magoughin was exhausted, grumpy, sore as hell and ready to set things on fire.

He wished he’d been down to see her first. Chastity, with her usual blunt directness, told Adamo there was no way in hell she’d be accepting another rider, and that Magoughin had better hurry up and get his new part finished so she could go up and get to crushing again. All this sitting around while the others got to fly was making her wings itch.

There might have been more fuss about it, but Adamo actually seemed relieved. Magoughin supposed he hadn’t wanted to dismiss a seasoned dragonrider after all.

~

He spent the night in his own room at the Airman, after a night of drinks with the boys. Ace was everything Ghislain had described, and at the same time nothing at all like he’d expected. Apparently Thoushalt was the new Hot Shit among the dragons, able to fill any role she needed. Ace was down for just about anything, too, as long as he was up in the air flying. Nobody said much about Magoughin’s arm, and he stayed off the roster for a while, but he convinced himself it was fine; Th’Esar himself had commissioned a kind of metal arm for him, and he had to go in for fittings every now and then as well as therapy to learn to live with just one hand. They tried to get him into a different counseling, too, because apparently there were people who got emotionally crippled by such a shocking loss. He managed to convince them that he was fine, really, as long as he could still be a soldier and fly his girl he’d manage. His emotional therapist threw up her hands in frustration and finally left when he admitted he’d named his left arm “stumpy.”

It took a few days, but he managed to convince Ivory, at one point, to pick the lock on Amery’s room (since Magoughin couldn’t quite manage a lock even with two working hands) while he was distracted, though he refused to share what he was doing. They all found out soon enough, anyway, when Amery stormed into the common room as white as a ghost screaming obscenities at Magoughin. To everyone’s delight, there were some choice phrases thrown in- his favorite being the one that insinuated his mother had gone to bed with a monkey- and he decided that he’d need to keep a notepad with him at all times to write down that kind of talk so he could add the phrases to his own artillery.

Amery was more upset than Magoughin had been about the arm, but that was probably because he wasn’t expecting it to be under his pillow. The rest of them learned fast, and got over their disgust one by one as it found its way into their rooms. Ivory was the only one who was immune to such treatment, but that was only because he’d threatened to cook and eat it if he found it under _his_ pillow, and Magoughin didn’t quite want to give it up for good.

Eventually, Magoughin realized that he wasn’t the only one hiding it under the other boy’s pillows, and he had to physically stop Ghislain from hanging it on the New Year’s wreath on the front door- not for propriety’s sake, but because he was afraid it would get stolen. They agreed that only new recruits would get the hand under their pillow from then on, and it went into a drawer in his room until it could be brought out again.

His new “hand” was finally completed a little after the new year. The cold chilled him worse than before, and raids had slowed to a complete stop. He made Ghislain go with him to get it fitted, and it wasn’t so much a hand as a little metal claw that he could open and shut by flexing. It would take some getting used to, but at least now he could grab Chastity’s reins, and after a few practice flights to be sure the new arm stayed on in midair, he’d be back on the roster and wrecking shit with the rest of the boys.

As payment, he took Ghislain to a little bakery along the Rue. His parents raised a fuss over him, of course, but he let it happen with a patient smile and a demand for several dozen of his favorite donuts, so he could bring them back to the Airman and eat them all in front of his comrades without sharing. They sat in a booth up front, dressed in their uniforms and their coats with big brass buttons so they got a lot of positive attention from the civilians who passed by.

“They’re working on new girls,” Ghislain mentioned, his massive hands dwarfing the mug of cocoa they were wrapped around. He had a scarf draped over his long coat, patriotic red and looking like it was there for fashion more than warmth; Ghislain was a constant source of behavior that none of the other boys could get away with, since he was too big to pick any fights with.

“I heard,” Magoughin said, feet propped up with casual insouciance on a chair. He only had a limited time to do it; if his parents didn’t kill him for putting his feet on the furniture, Adamo would put him on dog rations for a week once he heard about it. “Two more swifts and another Jacqueline. We’re gonna be outnumbered, man.”

Ghislain shrugged. “It will be another year at least before they’re finished. Maybe longer, if they’re picky about their riders.”

They fell into quiet as a group of ladies swarmed them, giggling into their fur muffs and flirting outrageously. By the time Magoughin and Ghislain had paid up and left, it was dark outside and bitter cold, freezing stumpy where the metal of his new arm met the flesh, but it didn’t bother him overmuch. The thought of getting back in the saddle was too thrilling, and the thought of new recruits to torture made everything he’d been through almost seem worthwhile.


End file.
